Course Overview
Four major parts
- Critical Thinking
- Bertrand Russell’s 1912 book The Problems of Philosophy.
- David Hume’s book, published in 1779, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.
- Contemporary work on climate change.
Free Books
Really, no money at all
The two books are freely available through Project Gutenberg.
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Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion at Project Gutenberg
Links to Books
Just for people reading at home
Project Gutenberg links to the books:
Brian’s online versions of the books.
Assessment
What You Have to Do
TKTK
Canvas
Where you find everything
This course, like pretty much all courses, has a canvas site.
Go to canvas.umich.edu, and you should find it easily enough.
It has the syllabus, links to the readings, these slides (as they are written).
Books
Also on Canvas
Under ‘Files’ on Canvas, I’ve put links to both
- The Project Gutenberg versions of the books; and
- The versions that I made which I think are easier to read, but your mileage may vary.
iClicker
One way to engage in class
This class will use iClicker in class. This will take attendance, but also let us run polls and quizzes.
Note that a poll is where I just want to know what you think, you’ll get full marks for any answer.
A quiz is where I want you to get the right answer. This will primarily be about the reading.
You need to set up the iClicker software (which is free for UM students) asap.
Asking Questions
This isn’t just a scripted performance from me. You can stop me and ask questions.
In fact, does anyone have questions so far?
Still, this is primarily about me talking. The discussion sections should be, if all goes well, primarily about you talking.
Canvas Chat
Yet Another Engagement Mechanism
There is also a group chat facility, helpfully called ‘Chat’, in Canvas.
During class, the discussion section leaders will monitor this, answer questions that come up, and let me know if lots of people have the same question.
I’ve tried using these before and, to be honest, it hasn’t been a great success. But if there is something that you want to bring up, and you’d rather not raise your hand in a large auditorium, that’s an option.
The Big Question
That a 101 course should answer
For courses that are not offered at most high schools, like sociology, linguistics, or philosophy, it’s common in 101 to say what we are, and what you get out of a course like this.
Unfortunately, this is a little harder in philosophy than some other disciplines.
I’ve heard even of courses that organise their entire introductory course around the question “What is Philosophy?”
The Big Question
With an answer
I’m not going to do that for two reasons.
- It sounds really dire.
- There is a simple answer - philosophy is theory. ###
Philosophy as Theory
What does that mean
In many subjects at UM, there is be some course with the term ‘theory’ or ‘theoretical’ in the title, or which says in the introduction that it is taking a more theoretical approach to questions.
Philosophy is what is covered in all those courses.
Philosophy as Theory
What does that mean
That implies that there are people doing philosophy across a whole range of departments at UM, or any other university.
One exciting thing about being at UM is that people tend to do philosophy very well across the university, something that isn’t guaranteed even at good universities.
And More
This could go all day
There are courses in physics, economics, English literature, gender studies, and many more that are like this.
The philosophy department has faculty cross-listed with law, linguistics, African American studies, Asian Languages and Culture, and so on.
My work overlaps a lot with economics, and that might come through in what I teach here.
Why Philosophy?
Why not just have theorists in every other department?
Because these theoretical debates often turn out to have a lot in common.
Knowing something about some of them helps with the other ones.
And there are very general things, especially about the nature of reasoning, but also about the nature of very general things like value, knowledge, existence, causation, etc, that are helpful across the various debates.
And that’s what philosophy does.
Best Philosophy
Why not both?
When I say some course elsewhere ‘overlaps’ with philosophy, does that mean that you should just listen to us, or that what we do is redundant?
- No, both courses are valuable.
- To do theoretical work on X, it helps to know a lot about X, and a lot about the nature of the theoretical questions involved.
- Different courses, and different profs, will help with each.
What is Philosophy
- Ethics
- Epistemology
- Political Philosophy
- Metaphysics
- Aesthetics
- Philosophy of Mind
- Philosophy of Language
- Logic
Note the last six really overlap with other departments (go over what they are) The first two are everywhere - how do we discover things about the world, and what should we do with that information, are completely central questions to every field of study One of the reasons I want to spend a bit of time on climate change is that it makes these issues so vivid.
Caveat about metaphysics - Historically it was much more tied to epistemology - what must the world be like if we are to know about it - It was also much more closely tied to theology; if the world is fundamentally divine, either causally or constitutively, that’s a very big thing that philosophy should have something to say about - And that’s something we’ll come back to a lot when discussing Hume’s Dialogues
